Thursday, October 27, 2016

The social philosophy that follows from Schulz’s reflections
on religion combines Gnostic elitism, transhumanism, and
existential despair about our ultimate fate. Along with Hindus and Buddhists
and even Western monotheists, Schulz admires spiritual elites who shun the
vulgar pursuits that define mass culture, because the spiritualists’
enlightenment has opened up a higher calling for everyone. But Schulz differs
with them as to the nature of that calling. The purpose of Eastern religions is
moksha, liberation from the natural
cycles that imprison us by clouding our judgment. That liberation requires
cognitive training and ascetic renunciation. Christianity and Islam emphasize
instead the need for a personal relationship with an almighty Creator, which
requires that we submit to this infinitely-greater being and understand the
grace of God’s interventions in the natural course which redound to our
benefit. God has revealed a path out of the thickets, and we must merely follow
his commandments and trust in the deity’s greatness despite God’s unsettling hiddenness
after the loss of our animistic innocence, that is, after the advent of settled
civilizations in the Neolithic Revolutions (around 10,000 BCE) and certainly
after what has been called the Axial Age, around the fifth century BCE.

As discussed in the last chapter, Schulz doesn’t take
Western theology at face value, but reinterprets it as a system of coded,
typically-unconscious references to the dynamics at play between divided human
classes. God is indeed hidden because God is literally dead. Prehistoric
animists didn’t realize this because they weren’t beholden to dehumanizing forms
of objectivity and instrumentality; instead, animists anthropomorphized their
surroundings, extending parochial human social functions to the natural world,
and misinterpreting the fact that life is abundant on this planet, as a sign
that life is metaphysically primary. As we now know by way of what we like to
call the modern, scientific outlook, life is an aberration in the natural
universe that extends far beyond not just our planet but our mundane concerns.
So Christianity’s fixation on an outcast messiah is meant to revolutionize
ethics—even though Church history serves the higher god of Irony; thus, the
Church canceled Jesus’ revolution in the Orwellian fashion, with doubletalk to excuse
Church leaders’ infamous compromises with secular authorities. And according to
Schulz, the Islamic call for submission to God is hopelessly wrongheaded in light
of God’s evident suicide. God’s gift to us isn’t to offer a path that leads to
a place by his side; rather, it’s to free us from the burden of having to serve
such a madman for all eternity. God accomplished that primordial act of
salvation, by creating the universe of natural beings which replaced God’s supernatural realm. The
personal God is no more, but Irony reigns in his stead and so Islamic
submission translates to servitude to terrestrial caliphs, mullahs, and
dictators—once again in line with mere bestial mammalian regularities. When
animal dominance hierarchies are re-established by so-called wise
apes, and these primitive social arrangements are rationalized by highfalutin
theistic rhetoric, we have the makings of a sick joke.

Whereas the practice of Western religions has thus been
farcical, on Schulz’s view, owing to the misguided, literal reading of
monotheistic scriptures, Eastern religions avoid farce with their insights into
the meaninglessness of the natural course of events. On the whole, liberation
from the world of suffering and illusions occurs as an act of extinction, mediated
by an ascetic victory over natural forces. Instead of the everlasting
preservation of our personality, according to the Eastern outlook we’re freed
from the anguish and indignity of having to be reborn in a cycle of absurd,
sometimes horrific events. “Victory through spiritual death” is the essence of
Eastern wisdom. For Schulz, though, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains offer a
misleading interpretation of life’s evolution. Life isn’t entirely pointless
and so a final death isn’t our ultimate purpose. Our active deity in nature is
Irony, the clash between facts and intuitions. Therefore, our task is to
maximize irony, to appreciate the irrelevance of our animal preoccupations so
that, as in Zoroastrianism, we can take a stand against our true enemy. But
while Zoroaster speaks of a final reconciliation after the apocalyptic end of
natural time, Schulz is more stoical than sanguine about our fate. Even if
there can be no absolute triumph of higher values, assuming the universe is
metaphysically tainted by its origin in the fall of divine being, we can
partially redeem nature with the fruits of our struggle against it.

However, Schulz’s writings are frustratingly short on
details of the nature of this redemption, and indeed this is the chief mystery
not just in Schulz’s philosophy but in the exploits of his cult. Schulz shares
with some Eastern currents of thought the view that thinking itself is the
primary evil. But whereas Zen Buddhists, for example, contend that so-called
rational thinking is cognitively inferior in that it produces the illusion of
egoism, and that a deeper experience of oneness is possible, Schulz maintains
that reason is baneful precisely because of its cognitive supremeness. Reason
presents the horror of fundamental truth, the fact that being in general is
absurd and that God is probably literally dead, but our use of reason also restores
divinity and so this cognitive expertise sets us on a course to God’s madness.
Reason undercuts itself by delivering rational creatures the unwanted grand
truth that a precondition of our happiness is the set of vices that comprises
the vulgar personality: above all, happiness depends on ignorance, in that the
more you know, the harder it is to sustain the short-sightedness needed to be
comfortable under any circumstance. Reason demonstrates that we have no proper
place in the universe and that our salvation can proceed only by our schemes
that all seem harebrained in historical hindsight.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—The National Institute of Mental
Health congratulated the Republican Party for helping to accustom Americans to those with mental
illness, by elevating obvious psychopaths to positions of high
office.

Doctor Fernando Lamas, chairman of the institute, said at a
press conference that Republican voters have done the United States “a great
service, showing more so-called progressive Americans that those with antisocial disorders—who are typically demonized in popular horror films—can be entrusted with political power as long as we shirk our civic
duties and learn to keep lowering our standards for acceptable public behaviour.”

According to Dr. Lamas, the Republican Party began this
initiative in the 1980s when Republicans found that they could concoct excuses
for Ronald Reagan’s declining health, which he suffered due to an onset of
Alzheimer’s. Prior to that, Republicans were embarrassed when President Nixon’s
megalomania was unveiled by the Watergate scandal.

“But their reverence for the mentally ill really ramped up,”
said Dr. Lamas, “when Republicans managed to keep a straight face as they
elected George W. Bush as president. Perhaps inadvertently at first, but surely
with a charitable intention thereafter, Republicans worked tirelessly to teach mentally
healthy citizens not to ignore the deranged, as George Bush Jr.’s cornucopia of
follies left the whole world dumbfounded.”

By excusing Bush’s daily embarrassments and epic fiascos, Republicans
brought mental disorder out of the shadows. Dr. Lamas compared this Republican
initiative to gay rights advocacy: “both Republicans and homosexuals flaunt
their peculiarities, whether on the national political stage or in Gay Pride
parades, forcing everyone else to become inured to that which they might once have
loathed.

"After Bush there was Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice
presidential nominee. With her bizarre turns of phrase, her unabashed ignorance
on all relevant matters, her clueless mix of Christianity, family values, and
sociopathic Republican boilerplate, she took hysterical mean-spiritedness to a
higher level.

“But it’s that party’s fearlessness in spotlighting such
palpably-malignant personalities,” continued Dr. Lamas, “as though they could be
entrusted with vast political power, that’s done wonders in removing the stigma
from mental illness.” Republicans have been particularly generous with
sociopaths, not just by thrusting them into mainstream discourse, but by “coaching
them to be evermore lax in disguising their inhuman lack of empathy.”

“Sociopathy, an extreme form of Antisocial Personality Disorder, is a mainstay of the political world,” said Gwendolyn Bianca, political
scientist at Fancypants University, who also spoke at the press conference.
Bianca argued that since it’s axiomatic that power eventually corrupts even the
most moral of individuals, we can expect that a disproportionate number of
politicians (as well as businesspeople and other wealthy or powerful persons)
lack the capacity to feel complex emotions.

“Conscience is a luxury they can’t afford,” said Bianca, “because
a politician’s duty demands that he or she sacrifice others for the greater
good, a burden that would be intolerable to anyone with some moral sense.”

Dr. Lamas said that because Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican
presidential nominee, has “given the game away, displaying no trace of shame or compassion, all Americans owe the Republican Party a debt of gratitude for its
service to the mentally ill.”

Bianca added that “whereas Democratic leaders have opted for
the traditional approach of hiding their elitist contempt for humanity behind
feel-good messages and empty socialist promises, psychopathic Republicans have
refused to sit at the back of the bus. Unlike Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton,
whose antisocial personalities were formed when they were indoctrinated into
the neoliberal technocracy and who thus mistake loss of conscience for exceptional rationality, Republican lunatics have shown no deference to the public’s
prejudice against human predators.

“Republican elites wear their insanity on their sleeve, whereas Democratic politicians pretend to care about the little people. And
bless the American voters for their bottomless tolerance for the absurd! Thanks
to that recklessness, mental health issues have come to the fore, which has flooded
the clinics across the nation with much-needed donations.”

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.